The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
A remote access appliance (hereinafter “appliance”) has often been used in modern day data centers to interface with and establish communications links with a plurality of servers or other serial or Ethernet type devices. Traditionally this has required separate interfaces on the appliance, typically one for Ethernet and one for serial. The Ethernet protocol interface is typically required for communicating with a server's Service Processor Manager (SPM), while the serial interface is required for communicating with the serial console port on the server. It would be a significant advance to be able to interface the appliance to either a serial port or an Ethernet port via a single connector port on the appliance itself, and to further have the appliance automatically sense which protocol (i.e., serial or Ethernet) is communicating information to its single port at any given time.